AWS Berwick data center, Berwick, Pennsylvania

Amazon Web Services is building a data center campus beside Talen Energy's Susquehanna nuclear plant in Salem Township, near Berwick in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, after buying an existing nuclear-powered data center at the site from Talen in March 2024. Salem Township supervisors approved rezoning roughly 1,600 acres for industrial use on May 30, 2024, clearing the way for as many as 15 data center buildings over the next decade.

The township expects up to 600 jobs and about $7 million a year in local tax revenue once Amazon's ten-year, 70 percent tax break runs out. Amazon has said the campus is part of a plan to invest at least $20 billion in Pennsylvania, creating at least 1,250 high-skilled jobs, and some residents at the rezoning hearing said turning farmland industrial would devalue their own land.

Three data center projects are now in play in the township: the AWS campus being built, an approved QTS project, and a third proposed by former state representative Mike Cabell. On August 25, 2026, Luzerne County Judge Lesa Gelb ruled that the Salem Township planning commission had violated Pennsylvania's Sunshine Act by holding a meeting on a zoning overlay for the third project while people trying to get in were shut out.

The eight residents who sued, with no lawyer between them, included Annie Vinatieri, Teri Barren and Nate Eachus. "What happened on Tuesday was an actual win for citizens everywhere across Pennsylvania," Vinatieri said. They then asked for a restraining order to stop a second planning commission meeting arranged after the first was invalidated; the judge refused, and the case continues.